Jill Tarter

Jill Tarter

Astronomer, SETI Institute

Biography

Jill Tarter holds the Bernard M. Oliver Chair for SETI Research at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California. She received her bachelor of engineering physics degree with distinction from Cornell University and her master’s and a Ph.D. in astronomy from the University of California, Berkeley. She served as project scientist for NASA’s SETI program, the High Resolution Microwave Survey, and has conducted numerous observational programs at radio observatories worldwide. She is a Fellow of the AAAS and the California Academy of Sciences, was named one of the Time 100 in 2004, and one of the Time 25 in Space in 2012. She received a TED prize in 2009, public service awards from NASA, multiple awards for communicating science to the public, and has been honored as a woman in technology. Since the termination of funding for NASA’s SETI program in 1993, she has served in a leadership role to design and build the Allen Telescope Array and to secure private funding to continue the exploratory science of SETI. Many people are now familiar with her work as portrayed by Jodie Foster in the movie “Contact.”